A Miscellany of Projects - Gaming, SCA Combat, Arts & Sciences, and Travel

As I've said elsewhere, I believe that book reviews should provide what the reader really  needs to know up front, so here it is: I wanted very much to like this book.  The Hatcher and Chidester editions of the Getty and Morgan manuscripts, respectively, are impressive books both as Fiore manuscripts and as works of scholarship.  Unfortunately, the Paris manuscript is easily the most frustrating publicly available edition of Fiore, and that trend continues here. To understand why the Paris manuscript, before translators get involved, is so damn frustrating requires a little bit of explanation.  The Getty, the Morgan, and the Pisani Dossi were all at least made by someone familiar with Fiore's system, almost certainly Fiore himself, and by a series of linked artists - fairly well established in Chidester's edition of the Morgan .  The Paris manuscript, meanwhile, was made by someone who had no idea what the hell they were looking at, but sure liked the fancy draw...

We live in a golden age for the accessibility of historical sword sources for English-language readers.  Take Fiore, for instance.  In addition to Hatcher's excellent version of the Getty manuscript  we have Marsden's translation and interpretation of the Paris manuscript  and this - Michael Chidester's HEMA Bookshelf edition of the Morgan manuscript .  The only known Fiore that doesn't have an English-language release is the privately held Pisani Dossi. Reviews should tell you what you need to know up front, so this is the headline: the Morgan isn't my favorite Fiore manuscript (I think Getty's progression is better for training, and it's more complete), but I think this is probably my favorite of the modern Fiore manuscript editions.  That is a very tight race, but Chidester wins. Chidester is not a Fiore partisan, unlike, say, Windsor , but has a deep western sword background, such that he is the chief editor and director at Wiktenauer .  His backg...

Before I start reviewing the Chidester reproduction of the Morgan manuscript , I'd like to talk about parrying and defense in longsword, based on a passage I read in Meyer.  To do so first requires me to express some frustrations. The frustration is this: Meyer knows what he's talking about, generally, and has some excellent  advice, but Meyer is also writing for gentleman duelists, not for killers, and Meyer has a very bad case of OCD in trying to document every potential combat situation he can think of.  This weakens his overall approach, especially considering that Meyer, writing in a different era from, say, Fiore, relied much more heavily on text than on images.  The number of woodcuts in Meyer, compared to the overall length of his book, is frustratingly small, and the Meyer woodcuts varied even more substantially than the Fiore drawings vary from edition to edition.  This means that to understand Meyer, you really  need either a guide, or a lot ...